Harry walked home with a split lip, sore ribs, and a secret buzzing under his skin. The city stretched around him, all steel and glass under the evening sun, alive with the pulse of quirks. A man floated crates onto a truck with telekinesis. A woman with owl feathers tucked her wings into a trench coat as she entered the train station. Billboards screamed with the latest hero rankings—smiling faces, broad shoulders, capes flaring against impossible winds.
Harry tugged the strap of his battered school bag tighter. He walked faster, head down, weaving between people who didn't see him. They didn't see boys like him—quirkless, orphaned, scarred. Just shadows on the sidewalk.
But today, for the first time, Harry carried something no one else could see: the memory of desks rattling, papers scattering, and a bully falling on his ass from a force that came from him.
Magic.
He replayed it with every step, heart thrumming faster. The push, the surge, the air itself shifting. It hadn't been imagination. It hadn't been a hallucination born of pain. It was real.
But then the second thought followed, darker: it had been an accident. He hadn't controlled it. He hadn't even understood it.
I can't count on accidents in this world, he thought grimly. Not here. Not in the world of quirks, villains, and battles fought on rooftops.
His scar ached faintly, but no whispers came. Just the dull throb of a wound that had always been there. He rubbed it and walked faster.
The bullies were waiting the next day. Of course they were.
"Scarface!" one of them called across the schoolyard, voice oily with triumph. "Thought you could get away with that little trick yesterday?"
Harry kept walking, eyes fixed on the doors.
The boys closed in, circling him like vultures. The leader—big shoulders, acne-pocked cheeks, knuckles that cracked like firecrackers—smirked. "What's the deal, huh? Hiding your quirk all this time? Trying to look pathetic so the rest of us would let you be?"
Harry froze. His fists clenched around the straps of his bag. He wanted to say it wasn't a quirk. That it was something else entirely. But who would believe him? Who in this world even had the word magic in their vocabulary without laughing?
"Leave me alone," Harry muttered.
The boy shoved him hard. Harry stumbled, braced—waiting for the surge, for that wave of force to roll out of him again.
Nothing.
The world stayed still.
The shove knocked him into the wall, pain blossoming in his shoulder. The laughter stung worse.
"Guess it only works once, Scarface!" the bully jeered. "Some quirk you've got."
Another shove, another bruise, no magic. When they were done, Harry slid down the wall, breathing through his teeth, humiliated all over again.
I can't trigger it, he realized. It's not just unreliable—it's random. If it only happens when I'm scared or angry, I'll never survive out there.
He trudged home with new bruises and an old resolve hardening in his chest.
That night, after lights-out, Harry sat cross-legged on his bed in the orphanage dormitory, the blanket pulled over his head like a tent. A battered notebook lay open across his lap, pages yellowed, corners curled.
His hand trembled with excitement as he wrote the first line:
Magic is real.
He stopped, stared at the words until his pulse calmed, then added beneath it:
Not a quirk. Something else.
He tapped the pencil against the paper. His mind flickered between two lives—the boy Harry Potter, bullied, lonely, orphaned; and the man who had lived a full life before waking here. That man had been an engineer. He remembered long nights hunched over schematics, breaking problems into parts, testing variables until systems clicked into place.
He whispered into the dark: "Then that's what I'll do now. Engineer it."
He drew a diagram.
Trigger: Emotion (anger, fear, desperation).
Channel: Body.
Output: Force wave.
He stared at the simple model, heart racing.
"If it's energy," he muttered, "then it has rules. Inputs. Outputs. Parameters. I just need to find them."
The pencil scratched furiously across the page, arrows connecting circles, words scrawled in margins. Accidental magic = uncontrolled channeling. Goal = stable, repeatable casting.
He circled the word repeatable three times.
At midnight, Harry crept out into the orphanage courtyard, notebook clutched to his chest. The air was cool, carrying the smell of asphalt and faint cooking smoke from nearby apartments. The courtyard was empty except for a broken swing set that creaked in the breeze.
He set the notebook on the swing and stood in the patchy grass.
"Okay," he whispered. "Test one."
He thrust his hand forward, imagining the wave that had thrown the bully back. He tried to channel energy down his arm, out of his palm.
Nothing.
He tried again, harder, gritting his teeth. Nothing but his arm trembling from tension.
"Test two. Lumos."
He whispered the word, almost reverent, remembering how he had whispered it last night. He pictured a tiny bead of light on his fingertip.
Nothing.
He clenched his jaw, sweat beading at his temple.
"Test three. Visualization only."
He closed his eyes, pictured a flashlight beam cutting through the dark, focused until his temples ached. For a moment, he thought he felt something—a fizz, a static hum in his fingers. Then it faded.
He opened his eyes to darkness.
Harry's chest tightened. His shoulders sagged. "So it really was just… luck."
For a moment despair threatened to choke him. He wanted to throw the notebook, to scream into the night that the universe had played a cruel joke.
But instead he picked up the notebook, flipped to a blank page, and wrote:
Observation: Unstable. Cannot trigger on command.Hypothesis: Emotion overloaded the magic channel. Need method of stable focus.Next step: Create spell model with clear parameters.
His hand stilled on the page. Then he carefully wrote at the top:
Spell Model 001 – Lumos (Light).
Beneath it, he drew sketches of possible outputs:
A soft glow for reading.
A focused cone, like a flashlight.
A burst of blinding light, like a flashbang.
He stared at the page until something warm stirred in his chest. For the first time in years—maybe in both lives—he felt like he had a project worth everything.
The next day, Harry sat at his desk in class, notebook hidden under his arm, scribbling so quickly his hand cramped. He sketched runes, circles, diagrams of light spreading in cones. He tested calculations in the margins: distance, intensity, duration.
From across the room, another boy noticed.
Izuku Midoriya hunched over his own desk, scribbling in his hero analysis notebook. He glanced up when the scratching of Harry's pencil caught his attention.
Harry's page was filled not with words, but diagrams—circles, arrows, labels like "Magic Channel → Output: Light." His handwriting was messy but precise, like he was solving equations instead of doodling.
Midoriya blinked. He's… like me. Another notebook kid.
He leaned slightly, trying to see more, curiosity burning through his shyness.
Harry noticed. He closed the notebook halfway, guarding it like treasure.
Midoriya flinched. "S-sorry," he mumbled. Then, after a pause, "Are you… analyzing quirks?"
Harry hesitated. His throat went dry. The truth—that it wasn't quirks at all—would sound insane. But lying completely felt wrong too.
"Something like that," Harry said at last. "An experiment."
Midoriya's eyes lit with recognition. "Oh! I—I do that too! Well, not experiments, more like… notes. On heroes. Their moves, abilities, strategies." He lifted his own notebook, its cover plastered with stickers.
Harry glanced at it, then at the boy's bright, nervous face. For a moment, his guard lowered. "Guess we're both notebook nerds, then."
They shared awkward, sheepish smiles. Two boys who didn't quite fit anywhere else, connected by graphite and obsession.
That night, Harry sat cross-legged again, notebook open, pencil poised. The page titled Spell Model 001 – Lumos (Light) stared back at him, waiting.
He touched the pencil to paper and whispered into the quiet dormitory: "Magic isn't an accident anymore. It's my project."
He wrote his first rule:
Magic obeys intent. Accidents happen because intent is unfocused. A spell model is focused intent made repeatable.
He circled it twice, underlined it once.
Then he leaned back, staring at the blank page ahead. It wasn't a void anymore. It was a frontier.
He smiled.
No Hogwarts. No wand. No teachers. Just him, a notebook, and the will to build something new.
And that was enough.